New Yorker Films, 1963-2008

In college, a friend made a 16mm faux trailer for an apocryphal Straub-Huillet film starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Marlon Brando, entitled “The Patriarch, the Plebian and the Penis.” Their austere camera style was part of the send-up, as well as a critic’s quote: “A one-of-a-kind film… may be the best of its kind ever made.” (Which I used years later in film review.) The best joke, if the title didn’t have you rolling in the aisles right off, was the credit up top, with a logo familiar from all the scritch-scratchy 16mm prints of movies we’d rented for the university film societies, with one addendum: “Coming for Christmas from New Yorker Films.” I think we’d just watched Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small when the notion came up. We were readily amused in those days and I think it was also around the time we’d witnessed a double feature of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor. The idea of a Christmas promo from the company still makes me smile, but not the news that its library had been used as collateral on a loan that went into default and the company was shut down today. And, among the modest honorifics that have ever come my way was the pleasure of being quoted on New Yorker DVDs from Tim Roth, Emir Kusturica and Claire Denis, even if the quotes are goofy. For Underground, it’s something about beer and women; for Beau Travail, it’s the ellipsis-heavy “A MASTERPIECE! Exquisite… Mysterious… Magical.” Missing only a second exclamation point! Presentation treatments and the seven-to-fifteen second fanfares that accompany them have always given me a little rush, on films old or new. But the silent white-on-blue New Yorker logo that accompanied movies like Wim Wenders’ American Friend is forever married in my memory to the low hiss and crackle of a well-distressed 16mm optical soundtrack. Here’s hoping some part of their legacy is salvaged from the bank’s vaults. In his new blog at the New Yorker, Richard Brody considers implications of the closure, including the fact that “unlike book publishers, whose wares are widely distributed to libraries (it’s bitterly sad when a publisher goes out of business, but the back catalogue is already out there), film distributors hold the prints of the movies they own rights to; those which are out on home video have a second life, but the 35mm prints are, as of now, locked up, and revival houses wanting to screen them are simply out of luck.” [More at the link.]

“I think [technology has[ its made my life faster, it’s made the ability to succeed easier. But has that made my life better? Is it better now than it was in the eighties or seventies? I don’t think we are happier. Maybe because I’m 55, I really am asking these questions… I really want to do meaningful things! This is also the time that I really want to focus on directing. I think that I will act less and less. I’ve been doing it for 52 years. It’s a long time to do one thing and I feel like there are a lot of stories that I got out of my system that I don’t need to tell anymore. I don’t need to ever do The Accused again! That is never going to happen again! You hit these milestones as an actor, and then you say, ‘Now what? Now what do I have to say?'”
~ Jodie Foster

“If there’s one rule Hollywood has metaphysically proven in its century ofexperimentation, it’s that there’s no amount of money you can’t squander in the quest for hits.

“Netflix has spent the past couple years attempting to brute-force jailbreak this law. Its counter-theory has seemed to be, sure, a billion dollars doesn’t guarantee quality but how about three billion dollars? How about five billion dollars? Seven?

“This week’s latest cinematic opus to run across no-man’s-land into the machine-gun emplacements has been the Jared Leto yakuza movie ‘The Outsider.’ Once again, debuting on Netflix, another thing called a movie that at one glance doesn’t look like any kind of movie anyone has ever seen before, outside of off-prime time screenings at the AFM.

“If you’re working at a normal studio, you have one or two of these total misfires in a year and people start calling for your head. How many is Netflix going on? Fifteen? Twenty? This quarter? Any normal company would be getting murdered over results like that.”
~ Richard Rushfield